Hey, it’s Alex, let me catch you up!

Since last week, OpenAI convinced OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger to join them, while keeping OpenClaw.. well... open. Anthropic dropped Sonnet 4.6 which nearly outperforms the previous Opus and is much cheaper, Qwen released 3.5 on Chinese New Year’s Eve, while DeepSeek was silent and Elon and XAI folks deployed Grok 4.20 without any benchmarks, and it’s 4 500B models in a trenchcoat?

Also, Anthropic updated rules state that it’s breaking ToS to use their plans for anything except Claude Code & Claude SDK (and then clarified that it’s OK? we’re not sure)

Then Google decided to drop their Gemini 3.1 Pro preview right at the start of our show, and it’s very nearly the best LLM folks can use right now (though it didn’t pass Nisten’s vibe checks)

Also, Google released Lyria 3 for music gen (though only 30 seconds?) and our own Ryan Carson blew up on X again with over 1M views for his Code Factory article, Wolfram did a deep dive into Terminal Bench and .. we have a brand new website:

https://thursdai.news 🎉

Great week all in all, let’s dive in!

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Big Companies & API updates

Google releases Gemini 3.1 Pro with 77.1% on ARC-AGI-2 (X, Blog, Announcement)

In a release that surprised no-one, Google decided to drop their latest update to Gemini models, and it’s quite a big update too! We’ve now seen all major labs ship big model updates in the first two months of 2026. With 77.1% on ARC-AGI 2, and 80.6% on SWE-bench verified, Gemini is not complete SOTA across the board but it’s damn near close.

The kicker is, it’s VERY competitive on the pricing, with 1M context, $2 / $12 (<200k tokens), and Google’s TPU speeds, this is now the model to beat! Initial vibe checks live on stage did not seem amazing, Nisten wasn’t super impressed, Ryan took one glance at the SWE-bench pro not being SOTA and decided to skip, and he’s added that, at some point, it is benefitting to pick a model and stick to it, the constant context switching is really hard for folks who want to keep shipping.

But if you look at the trajectory, it’s really notable how quickly we’re moving, with this model being 82% better on abstract reasoning than the 3 pro released just a few months ago!

The 1 Million Context Discrepancy, who’s better at long context?

The most fascinating catch of the live broadcast came from LDJ, who has an eagle eye for evaluation tables. He immediately noticed something weird in Google’s reported benchmarks regarding long-context recall. On the MRCR v2 8-needle benchmark (which tests retrieval quality deep inside a massive context window), Google’s table showed Gemini 3.1 Pro getting a 26% recall score at 1 million tokens. Curiously, they marked Claude Opus 4.6 as “not supported” in that exact tier.

LDJ quickly pulled up the actual receipts: Opus 4.6 at a 1-million context window gets a staggering 76% recall score. That is a massive discrepancy! It was addressed by a member of DeepMind on X in a response to me, saying that Anthropic used an internal model for evaluating this (with receipts he pulled from the Anthropic model card)

Live Vibe-Coding Test for Gemini 3.1 Pro

We couldn’t just stare at numbers, so Nisten immediately fired up AI Studio for a live vibe check. He threw our standard “build a mars driver simulation game” prompt at the new Gemini.

The speed was absolutely breathtaking. The model generated the entire single-file HTML/JS codebase in about 20 seconds. However, when he booted it up, the result was a bit mixed. The first run actually failed to render entirely. A quick refresh got a version working, and it rendered a neat little orbital launch UI, but it completely lacked the deep physics trajectories and working simulation elements that models like OpenAI’s Codex 5.3 or Claude Opus 4.6 managed to output on the exact same prompt last week. As Nisten put it, “It’s not bad at all, but I’m not impressed compared to what Opus and Codex did. They had a fully working one with trajectories, and this one I’m just stuck.”

It’s a great reminder that raw benchmarks aren’t everything. A lot of this comes down to the harness—the specific set of system prompts and sandboxes that the labs use to wrap their models.

Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.6, with 1M token context and near-Opus intelligence at Sonnet pricing

The above Gemini release comes just a few days after Anthropic has shipped an update to the middle child of their lineup, Sonnet 4.6. With much improved Computer Use skills, updated Beta mode for 1M tokens, it achieves 79.6% on SWE-bench verified eval, showing good coding performance, while maintaining that “anthropic trained model” vibes that many people seem to prefer.

Apparently in blind testing inside Claude Code, folks preferred this new model outputs to the latest Opus 4.5 around ~60% of the time, while preferring it over the previous sonnet 70% of the time.

With $3/$15 per million tokens pricing, it’s cheaper than Opus, but is still more expensive than the flagship Gemini model, while being quite behind.

Vibing with Sonnet 4.6

I’ve tested out Sonnet 4.6 inside my OpenClaw harness for a few days, and it was decent. It did annoy me a bit more than Opus, with misunderstanding what I ask it, but it definitely does have the same “emotional tone” as Opus. Comparing it to Codex 5.3 is very easy, it’s much nicer to talk to. IDK what kind of Anthropic magic they put in there, but if you’re on a budget, Sonnet is definitely the way to go when interacting with Agents (and you can get it to orchestrate as many Codex instances as you want if you don’t like how it writes code)

For Devs: Auto prompt caching and Web Search updates

One nice update Anthropic also dropped is that prompt caching (which leads to almost 90% decrease in token pricing) for developers (Blog) and a new and improved Web Search for everyone else that can now use tools

Grok 4.20 - 4 groks in a trenchcoat?

In a very weird release, Grok has been updated with the long hyped Grok 4.20. Elon has been promising this version for a while (since late last year in fact) and this “release” definitely felt underwhelming. There was no evaluations, no comparisons to other labs models, no charts (heck, not even a blogpost on X.ai).

What we do know, is that Grok 4.20 (and Grok 4.20 Heavy) use multiple agents (4 for Grok, 16 for Heavy) to do a LOT of research and combine their answers somehow. This is apparently what the other labs use for their ultra expensive models (GPT Pro and Gemini DeepThink) but Grok is showing it in the UI, and gives these agents... names and personalities.

Elon has confirmed also that what’s deployed right now is ~500B “small” base version, and that bigger versions are coming, in one of the rarest confirmations about model size from the big labs.

Vibe checking this new grok, it’s really fast at research across X and the web, but I don’t really see it as a daily driver for anyone who converses with LLMs all the time. Supposedly they are planning to keep teaching this model and get it “improved week over week” so I’ll keep you up to date with major changes here.

Open Source AI

It seems that all the chinese OSS labs were shipping before the Chinese New Year, with Qwen being the last one of them, dropping the updated Qwen 3.5.

Alibaba’s Qwen3.5 397B-A17B: First open-weight native multimodal MoE model (X, HF)

Qwen decided to go for Sparse MoE architecture with this release, with a high number of experts (512) and only 17B active parameters.

It’s natively multi-modal with a hybrid architecture, able to understand images/text, while being comparable to GPT 5.2 and Opus 4.5 on benches including agentic tasks.

Benchmarks aside, the release page of Qwen models is a good sniff test on where these model labs are going, they have multimodality in there, but they also feature an example of how to use this model within OpenClaw, which doesn’t necessarily show off any specific capabilities, but shows that the Chinese labs are focusing on agentic behavior, tool use and mostl of all pricing!

This model is also available as Qwen 3.5 Max with 1M token window (as opposed to the 256K native one on the OSS side) on their API.

Agentic Coding world - The Clawfather is joining OpenAI, Anthropic loses dev mindshare

This was a heck of a surprise to many folks, Peter Steinberger, announced that he’s joining OpenAI, while OpenClaw (that now sits on >200K stars in Github, and is adopted by nearly every Chinese lab) is going to become an Open Source foundation.

OpenAI has also confirmed that it’s absolutely ok to use your ChatGPT plus/pro subscriptions to use inside OpenClaw, and it’s really a heck of a thing to see how quickly Peter jumped from relative anonymity (after scaling and selling PSP...